


The Padawan

by Vittra



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Ben Solo Needs A Hug, F/M, Twitter made me do it, all aboard the pain train, dear diary
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-05
Updated: 2021-03-13
Packaged: 2021-03-19 02:29:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 5,574
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29867775
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vittra/pseuds/Vittra
Summary: Luke allows Rey to stay on Ahch-To, to read the sacred Jedi texts. Our scavenging heroine discovers another collection of texts, texts that intrigues her far more than the holy scripts Luke provides her with. It’s the diaries of a boy, who’s been dead for almost a decade, but that doesn’t stop her from falling in love with his words. The one who killed the young man connects to her, across the stars, and she can’t keep him out, no matter how hard she tries.
Relationships: Kylo Ren/Rey, Rey & Ben Solo | Kylo Ren, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 20
Kudos: 48





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Hiiiiii! How long did I manage to stay away? A week? It’s embarrassing, really. 
> 
> This fic isn’t connected to my other fics, it’s 100% inspired by this [twitter post.](https://twitter.com/reybencyera/status/1367743872722345987?s=20)
> 
> This story takes places right after TFA, and everything went down as it did in the movie, except from Kylo’s little speech of the island and Rey’s loneliness, and Rey didn’t tell him what she saw in his mind either. They barged into each other’s brains in silence, as one do.
> 
> English still isn’t my first language, and I beg you to forgive my errors. With that being said, I hope you’ll enjoy your ride on the pain train, heading for a galaxy far, far away.

“I won’t come with you,” Luke is unwavering, “and I won’t train you, but you may stay, and you’re welcome to search for your answers in the scriptures of the now dead Jedi order.”

Rey nods curtly. It’s not what she’d hoped for, but if Luke refuses to help the Resistance, she must learn how to do it herself. 

“Thank you, master Skywalker.”

“I’m nobody’s master, call me ‘Luke’.”

“Alright, master Luke.”

Luke sighs, but gestures for her to follow him. They climb the stairs in silence, before leaving them all together, carefully stepping around the nests of the peculiar looking birds, and balancing their way over jagged rocks. The tree they’re heading towards demands to be respected, looking like it has been standing there since the dawn of time, and like it will stay standing far longer than most things in this messed up galaxy. The tree is hollow, and Luke walks inside.

“Here they are, the last shreds of the Jedi,” he points to a pile of books, “I’ll ask the keepers to set up a hut for you.” 

Luke takes his leave without further ado, and Rey shifts the weight between her feet. Is she supposed to just grab the books, and bring them with her? Her eyes travel across the insides of the tree, past the books, over the floor of dirt, until they suddenly stop.

“Master Skywalker,” she calls out, “what’s in the chest?”

Luke pokes his head back in, and his eyes fall to the unassuming object that Rey’s staring at. The small chest is made of some kind of metal, and it’s covered in soot and dents. It doesn’t seem to have been touched in years.

“Oh,” Luke frowns, “I actually don’t know. It belonged to one of my students, and I couldn’t just leave it behind. So I’m safekeeping it.”

“Until your student returns?”

“No,” Luke shakes his head, “he’s gone. Like they all are.”

Rey remembers Han’s words, about the temple that burned. Luke clearly remembers it all too well. 

“I’m sorry,” Rey whispers.

“Yeah, well… me too, kid, me too.”

Rey’s hut is barely bigger than her AT-AT back at Jakku, but it suits Rey just fine. Master Skywalker helps her build a fire, and she spends the day walking back and forth from the tree to the hut, carrying load after load of the fragile books in her arms. In the end, there’s just two books left, along with the chest. The scavenger in her screams at her to investigate, while her conscience tells her to leave it where it is. Master Skywalker certainly wouldn’t approve of her sticking her nose where it doesn’t belong… but… maybe he won’t even notice? There’s no trampled path to the tree, which probably means that Skywalker rarely visits this part of the island, and she could bring the chest back with her, have a peek inside, and return it within a day. The old Jedi master won’t ever have to know. Rey picks the chest off the ground, with her heart beating frantically, as it sometimes does when she’s close to discovering something that’s particularly valuable. Rey buries her bad conscience among the whitened roots of the tree, and heads back to her hut.

Rey forces herself not to touch the chest until she’s certain that master Skywalker has gone to sleep. When the lights of his hut flickers out, she sits down on the floor, in front of the fire. She’s been feeding it tirelessly, unused to the cold dampness of Ahch-To, and it’s now twice the size it had been when Luke left it. The chest is locked, but Rey’s been picking things apart since she was five years old, and she only needs a couple of minutes, and the screwdriver she borrowed from Chewie, to unlock it. The lock snaps open with a satisfying ‘click’, and Rey places both of her hands at the sides of the lid. She closes her eyes, takes a deep breath, and opens the chest, along with her eyes. There’s no riches inside, not the kind she’s usually looking for anyway, like intact electronics or unused spare parts, but Rey still feels triumphant over her find. The chest is filled with notebooks, pretty ones at that, with black leather bindings, and she tentatively reaches out for one of them. The leather is dried out, and cracked all over, but the pages have survived the destruction of the temple with minimal damage. Rey opens the book, and reads the first page:

_To my dearest boy, on your tenth birthday. Please store your adventures in this book, and tell me all about them when we see each other again. Love, Mom._

It dates back seventeen standard years. Rey swallows hard. It’s strange, that people actually _have_ mothers, mothers who love them enough to write them promises of reunion, when they’re forced apart. She turns the page over, and the next one is covered in text, written in a different hand. The handwriting is beautiful, but the wording is on a more juvenile side, which makes sense if the owner of the book started to write as soon as he got it. The boy vividly describes the Jedi temple, his new master, the other padawans, and his training, but it somehow feels hollow to Rey, like the boy was trying to paint a picture prettier than his actual reality. Rey can’t stop reading, and she reaches for the other books as soon as she finishes the first one. She riffles through them, and realizes they cover a year each. All and all there’s seven notebooks, and she carefully returns them to their chest. Rey can’t wait to read the rest of them, but she needs to get some sleep. She hides the chest in a dark corner of her hut, covering it with her bag, and lies down on the stone bench that’s now her bed. She wonders who he was, the boy who spent seven years training under Luke, only to perish under the hand of Kylo Ren? And did he ever get the chance to tell his mother about his adventures, or was he ripped out of this life without ever seeing her again? 

The next day Rey comes face to face with the man who murdered the author of the seven notebooks. She tries to shoot him, but, even though the bolt hits him straight in his chest, he remains unharmed. He, on the other hand, tries to trick her into telling him where Luke is, and when he can’t do that, he starts to ramble about the Force.

“You’ll pay for what you’ve done!” 

To Han, to Finn, to Poe, to her, to the Padawan, he’ll pay for what he’s done to all of them. He disappears just as fast as he’d shown up, and Rey hikes to the highest point of the island. She falls to her knees when she reaches it, and begs the Force never to connect her with him ever again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> But will the Force listen?!
> 
> And by the way, I’m at Tumblr now! You’ll find me @ youmakemefeellike 👋


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Quick reminder: Kylo didn’t tell Rey what he saw in her head, and she didn’t tell him either, because of a vague idea of a plot 😅

The second book is different from the first. The boy, _the_ _padawan,_ stopped writing anecdotes, with beginnings and endings, as if he no longer wrote with the intent of retelling his adventures to someone else. This book is filled with notes instead, some of them are long, thoughtful and coherent, while others are brief and messy. Rey snorts when she finds the shortest note of the book:

_IDIOT._

She can’t know for sure, but if master Skywalker used to be even half as obnoxious as he is today, that note probably is about him. The padawan was roughly eleven when he wrote this diary, and it’s stuffed with complex analyses concerning the Force. If she hadn’t known that the boy had been ten the year before, she never would’ve been able to guess the author’s age. Besides his thoughts of the Force, there’s also passages where the boy’s feelings bleed through; his ever present self-doubt, the longing for his parents, the alienation from the other students… the padawan used to live with others, but his loneliness spills out over the pages nonetheless. Rey has walked through this life alone, and loneliness has practically become a part of her, but reading of his... Rey chokes down a sob, and puts the book back with the others. There’s nothing she can do for him now, anyway. 

The Force doesn’t listen to her plea, and it connects Rey to Kylo Ren during her first experience of rain. He tries to talk to her, but Rey refuses to take his bait. She can’t kill him through this strange Force-phenomena, and, since ending him is the only interaction she’s willing to have with him, she pretends he’s not there at all. Rey closes her eyes, turns her face to the sky, and allows the rain to drench her completely. She can feel him staring at her, like she’s a puzzle he can’t solve, but she doesn’t acknowledge him. He’s nothing to her, nothing but static noise. He’s gone when she reopens her eyes, and Rey can’t help but wonder if he remembers the lonely boy he once shared a home with. 

The third book is a black hole of despair, and Rey wants to smack Luke in his face for not noticing how tormented his own student had been. At twelve years old, the Padawan already struggled with the same thing as she’s struggling with now; staying clear of the darkness within. 

He’d started to write down his dreams in book number four. 

_I dream of a desert._

Rey swallows. 

_I try to walk through it, but the sand shifts under my feet, pulling me back, and I never reach her._

His dreams had been awful most of the time, and Rey doubts she’ll be able to sleep herself after reading about his nightmares. Dreams of the desert are woven together with his nightly horrors, and Rey can’t stop staring at the last page.

_I’m in the desert again, but I can’t get any closer. What if she’s real?_

Of course he hadn’t been dreaming of her _,_ she knows that, but the _idea,_ of someone dreaming of her, is enough to make her break down in a pitiful heap, right where she sits. 

The Jedi texts are almost impossible to make sense of, even with the help of Luke’s old notes and his dictionaries. Rey spends her days training, and reading, and she connects to Kylo Ren at least once each day. He doesn’t try to engage her in conversations anymore, and their connections pass in complete silence. She peeks at him, sometimes, when she can’t resist, and she always regrets it. It’s easy to think of him as nothing but a monster, but every time she sees his face, she’s reminded that he’s a man too. He looks weary, and melancholic. Rey figures he had it coming. 

At night she reads again, and she now knows more about the boy, than she does about anyone else. She pictures him as a sarcastic, headstrong, brilliant, sensitive person, and Rey would’ve loved to meet him, but...

_I’m so lonely._

There’s nothing else written on the page. It’s bluntly stated, without any finesse, but Rey can _taste_ his solitude. She wants to reach back in time and tell him: _me too_. She begins to fantasize of meeting him, in the moments between awake and asleep. He’s a bit older in her thoughts, and he finds her on Jakku, with his Jedi robes billowing in the wind. He tells her she’s forcing him to forsake his vows of never getting attached, because he simply can’t let her go, not now, when he’s finally found her. It’s a ridiculous fantasy, but Rey runs it over and over in her mind all the same. Maybe he would’ve found the woman he dreamt of, eventually, if he hadn’t been killed? The more Rey reads, the more she _hates_ Kylo Ren. 

She's always been capable with her staff, but that skill can’t fully explain her intuitive use of a saber. Rey must have stolen some of Kylo Ren’s moves, when she pushed back into his mind, and she needs to unlearn his stupid backhanded grip, in order to find her own style of fighting. She works through the forms again and again, and she doesn’t notice him, not until he speaks.

“That saber belongs to me.”

“You already told me that,” Rey snaps, between her movements, “now leave.”

“That technique belongs to me too.”

“Leave!” Rey leaps at him, and slashes down her saber from over her head.

To her massive surprise, and his, judging by the look on his face, their sabers crash together, as he parries her blow. They stay unmoving, with their sizzling blades locked together, and Rey tries to understand what this _means._ She lifts her gaze from their weapons, to his face, and he’s already looking at her. He parts his lips to say something, but Rey twirls in the other direction and breaks contact. Ren’s forced to stagger half a step forward, in order to regain his balance, and Rey swings at him again. He blocks her blows with ease, but he doesn’t truly fight her back, and _that_ provokes Rey beyond words. He defends himself with an amused expression, and Rey redoubles her efforts, determined to wipe his smugness straight out of _existence_. 

“Use your rage,” he purrs.

Rey falls face first into the gravel, when she puts all of her weight behind an attack that never hits its mark. Every time he vanishes, Rey wonders if he ever was there in the first place.

_Master Skywalker tells me to let go of my rage. But how? The others nod, and follow him like sheep, but I can’t put the fire out. I’ve tried, believe me, I really have._

It’s the echo of a almost fifteen year old boy, and his conviction of becoming a great Jedi seems to have been wavering. His dreams worsened, and he doesn’t mention his parents anymore. Rey gasps, when she finds a rough sketch of a desert landscape, with a female form standing by the horizon. He’d kept on dreaming of the desert then. Rey wonders if the girl had known that someone tried to figure out who she was? Is she still awaiting the boy? It’s been years since the boy dreamt of the girl, but Rey knows that time doesn’t matter when you’re waiting, you just keep on longing, even when all hope should be lost.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Am I in over my head with this one? 😬


	3. Chapter 3

The boy seems to have been rather ambivalent towards master Skywalker. By book six he’s switching between calling him ‘Luke’ and ‘Master’, and at times it’s honestly a bit difficult to follow the padawan’s thoughts, since his _opinions_ of his master seems to have been changing rapidly as well. 

_Luke is such a drag. ‘You need to master your mind, young one.’ What’s the use of even having a saber, if you’re not allowed to use it?_

Rey snickers. Ever since she got to the island Luke’s been hovering around her, seemingly unable to keep his vow of not teaching her. He’s been trying to get her to meditate more and fight less, but Rey figures there’ll be time for ‘finding her inner balance’, or whatever, after she’s beaten Kylo Ren. Luke stresses again and again that she has to ‘be in the right state of mind’ when she does meet Kylo, but Rey doesn’t agree, she just needs to be able to _win_ , _how_ she does it is irrelevant. Apparently the padawan shared her feelings on Luke’s love for meditation, but he turned on his heel from time to time, and wrote things like:

_My master is wise, and knows my potential._

Which honestly doesn’t sound at all like the Luke the padawan usually describes, but Rey guesses the Jedi master might have been different back then. 

Rey decides to compromise. She runs her drills like she always does, with a wooden staff instead of her (Luke’s?) saber, but she closes her eyes and lets the Force guide her. It has to count as meditation, because she’s moving slowly, in a mental state of nothingness. She’s not focusing on the pressure of helping the Resistance, or on her gnawing fury, or on her strange feelings about a boy who’s been dead for a decade, no, she’s just _blank_. She doesn’t even react to the fact that she’s once again falling back to using the backhand grip, since she’s too lost in the currents of the Force to even notice. She breathes, and moves, breathes, and moves, breathes, and crashes her back into something warm and solid. Massive arms cages her, with a gloved hand holding a red saber at the end of one of them. Rey awkwardly spins around, using whatever she can reach for leverage, and her eyes grow wide when she realizes she’s supporting herself against Kylo Ren. Rey pushes herself away from him, with one hand splayed out over his chest, stepping backwards. He’s staring at her, and Rey, who’s still caught in the flow of the Force, fails to acknowledge that he’s her worst enemy. His Force signature crackles under her palm, and she can’t keep from shutting her eyes, in order to truly _feel_ it. It’s so undeniably _his,_ the sensation that crashes up through her arm, dark but not pitch black, violent and wild, almost feral, but still somehow soft around the edges, and she could drown in it, it’s nothing like she’s ever felt— Rey suddenly remembers who she is, and rips her hand off of him, as if she’s been burned. He looks completely bewildered, frozen in place, with his saber still ignited in his hand, and Rey turns crimson. The Force shows mercy, leaving Rey alone once more, alone with a frantic heart, and with an all-consuming sense of shame that drives her to her knees. 

“Master Skywalker,” Rey begins, when she’s eating dinner with Luke and Chewbacca, “do you know anything about… like, connecting to someone through the Force?”

“Ah,” Luke nods, “are you reading about Force bonds?”

“Yeah,” Rey lies, “but I find it really hard to translate.”

“I know,” Luke muses, “well, Force bonds are rare, but not unheard of. It’s usually shared between master and padawan, but not always. Me and Leia have one, you know.”

“Really? You can see each other through the Force?”

“No, no, not _see_ each other precisely, I’ve never heard of that kind of bond, but we can sense each other, and sometimes use it to send a message.”

“So you can’t like… talk?”

“No, it’s a one-way form of communication.”

“I see,” Rey bites her lip, “so people can’t interact through a bond?”

“I’ve never found any evidence of that, but that doesn’t mean it’s never happened, nor that it never will.”

Rey wonders if she should tell him it already has.

She doesn’t find enough peace within herself to read the padawan’s diary tonight. She’s lying on her stone bench, staring at the fire, and tries to forget about Kylo Ren’s Force signature. It unsettles her deeply, when she fails over and over. It’d been magnetic, the way it’d pulled her in, so _alive_ with just about _everything,_ and the worst part is that she feels like she knows it from somewhere, but she can’t figure out why she recognizes it. She shuts her eyes, hard, and wills herself to think of fixing a generator instead. She sees the cables in her mind’s eye, the fried ones as well as the new ones, and she carefully focuses on how to replace them. It works, until she’s seconds from falling asleep, when the memory of his blazing energy burns through her. She’d rather die than admitting it, even to herself, but part of her wishes she’d kept her hand upon him, just for a little while longer. 

She’s dreaming that night. It’s an old dream, and it’s been part of her nightly life for as long as she can remember. She’s back home, on Jakku, but in the dream she never left in the first place, and she’s staring out over the vastness with an unshakable feeling that _this is it._ Her waiting will finally be over, at last. But Rey’s dreamt this so many times that she now knows it’s a dream, and that she’ll just keep on standing there for the entirety of it, without ever seeing anything else than dunes. But… tonight it’s different. She’s standing by her AT-AT, with her staff in her hand, and with her eyes fixed at the horizon. At first she thinks she’s hallucinating from the heat, but she eventually realizes that there _is_ someone coming. The figure stumbles clumsily in the shifting sands, he’s obviously not from Jakku, but he’s still moving towards her with a striking determination. He’s tall, all dressed in black, and with a head of black curls. The strong wind thrashes through those curls, making a complete mess of his hair, and Rey grins when she sees the man run an annoyed hand over it. She knows that move from somewhere, she’s seen it before… Rey snaps upright, and almost falls out of bed, when she realizes she’s allowed _Kylo Ren_ to enter her dreams. 

Rey’s set on not dwelling on the dream. _Of course_ she dreamt about him, since she spent the entire evening trying to keep from _thinking_ of him. It’s only natural, that the thoughts spilled over to her subconscious instead, that doesn’t mean having him in the dream _meant_ anything. She finds it unnerving though, that she hasn’t dreamt this dream in quite some time, and that she hasn’t seen the likeness of her dream and the padawan’s before, but she sees it now, and Rey can’t shake the feeling that those similarities somehow _matter_. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The scene where Rey bumps into Kylo was heavily influenced by the gorgeous work of Kasiopea. We should all bow to her.
> 
>   
> [Part 1.](https://kasiopea-star-wars.tumblr.com/post/175240758245/finding-the-force-together-to-be-continued)  
>   
>   
> [Part 2.](https://kasiopea-star-wars.tumblr.com/post/177145455750/finding-the-force-together-part-ii-im-really)  
>   
>   
> [Part 3.](https://kasiopea-star-wars.tumblr.com/post/178575114215/finished-no-reylo-kiss-this-time-im-afraid)  
> 


	4. Chapter 4

Rey can’t explain why, but she can’t bring herself to read the last of the seven diaries. She’s keeping it in her bag, and carries it with her wherever she goes, but she simply _can not_ read it. She trains instead, and curses the way Kylo Ren has wedged himself into her saber forms. Every time she tries to move differently she either burns herself, or drops the weapon on the ground, and the frustration makes her shift back to working with her old familiar staff. The staff is an extension of herself, and the way she handles it is completely her own. If she only could have a… lightstaff? Rey’s never seen one, but she figures it can’t be an impossibility, if you just had two kyber crystals, and plenty of stabilizers… she rushes back to her hut, and grabs one of the still unread Jedi books (truth be told, she hasn’t finished a single one of them). She takes the book with her, and brings it to a ledge surrounded by a massive rock formation. The rocks shelter her from the strong winds that’s constantly whipping the island, and she sits down with her back against it. A few of the birds, that Luke calls porgs, join her, apparently she’s not the only one who appreciates a little stillness. They waddle around for a bit, before settling down, not an arms length away from her. Rey opens the book, and shuffles through the pages. It covers the history of lightsabers, some theories of kyber crystals, where to find kyber, the process of building a saber, and a dictionary over different kinds of sabers. Rey grins when she finds an illustration of a staff with twin blades, shooting out from each end. It _is_ possible then. She likes Luke’s saber good enough, but it’s not _hers,_ and she suddenly aches for her own weapon, built by no one but herself. When the padawan had been thirteen, he’d followed Luke to a mine, and spent a day searching for _his_ crystal, and the retelling of that journey is the happiest part out of all of his notebooks. He’d spent two pages going on and on about the sensation of rightness, as he started to come close to the crystal that would become the power source of his saber. Rey wants that too, she wants to enter the darkness, and return with something unexplainable; dead matter that yet somehow _lives,_ something that chose _her._ Rey looks up from the book, and discovers that the porgs are no longer her only company. Kylo Ren sits in an armchair, on her right side, close enough to touch, with his eyes flickering over a tablet. His hair whirl around his face, since he’s head sticks up over the sheltering rock formation, and Rey wonders how this Force connection _works?_ But he doesn’t say anything, and neither does she. Rey returns to her book, and he eventually fades away. 

“Is there any kyber left on Jedha?” Rey asks Luke, as casually as she can.

“You already own a saber,” Luke squints at her.

“No, I’m _borrowing_ a saber, but it’s not mine, it’s yours. Besides, I got this idea of a staff, instead of a saber.”

“One blade isn’t enough for you?”

Rey can’t exactly tell him that she accidentally stole her moves from his nephew, and that she worries she won’t be able to kill him, because of his expertise on their shared technique, so she just shrugs instead.

“I’ve always fought with a staff, it just feels more natural.”

“The mines of Jedha are all but barren now,” Luke sighs, “I suppose there might be a few crystals left, but it’s nothing like the mines of Ilum.”

“There’s nothing left of Ilum, it’s just space dust.”

“Yeah,” Luke shakes his head, “it’s a pity. I remember when I brought the younglings… I never saw Ben happier than when he’d found his kyber.”

“He bleed it,” Rey spits out.

“Poorly, if Chewie is correct. It’s unstable, no?”

”His saber is a crackling mess.”

”He was always a bit unstable, so I guess it’s fitting. He never quite managed to attain a quietness of mind.”

Rey figures he can’t have been the only one who struggled with _that_ , since she does too, and the padawan certainly had.

“Isn’t that common?” Rey once again attempts to sound indifferent.

“Perhaps, but most of my students managed it before the age of thirteen, and he was the only one above fifteen who failed on a regular basis.”

Rey figures master Skywalker must be mistaken, it’s been years since he had students, he must have forgotten about the padawan, and his difficulties to reach that state of inner stillness. Of course Kylo Ren taints everything, even Luke Skywalker’s memories of his other padawans. Rey swallows her thoughts on the matter, it’s hardly the right time to admit that she's been reading the journals, and she tries to steer the conversation back to practicalities _._

“But there could be some kyber left on Jedha?”

“There’s a few mines up north, there might be a bit left there.”

“Won’t you come with me? And return to your sister?”

“Oh, young one,” Luke mumbles tentatively, “I don’t think… will you give me a couple of days to think about it?”

Rey beams back at him.

“That’s all I ask.”

The restlessness doesn’t subside. The last diary is weighing her down, her bag is heavier than ever, and she knows there’ll be no true peace until she’s read it. She still doesn’t understand _why_ she’s so reluctant, but she notices that she’s even more hesitant after her conversation with Luke. She tries to convince herself that it’s just a book, like the others, but she can’t shake the feeling of irreversibility, like the book somehow will alter her entire life, in a way there’s no coming back from. Rey puts it off for two more days, but she finally caves when she’s hiking up to the old Jedi temple. There’s a small body of water beside the temple, and Rey sits down next to it. Some kind of floating flowers litter the water, but the tranquility of her surroundings doesn’t match her turmoil within. She brushes her fingers over the cracked leather, takes a deep breath and opens the book. Rey almost sighs in relief, when she recognizes the padawan’s unmistakable irony, and his insightful reflections on the Force. Maybe she’d just been silly for worrying about reading this book? But the book turns darker, and darker, and if that wasn’t enough to tell her everything she doesn’t want to know, the padawan has spelled it out for her.

_Naming me after some holy Jedi knight might have been their worst idea ever, next to getting married. There’s nothing holy about me._

Rey can’t stop her hands from shaking, but she can’t stop reading either. 

_Skywalker is constantly nagging me about resisting the darkness, but master tells me there is nothing wrong in drawing power from the dark, as well as the light. The Force is the Force, no matter what we call it._

It can’t be. This _can’t_ be true. 

_I still dream of the desert, but she’s turned away from me._

No, no, no.

_It’s tearing me apart. I’ll never be what they need me to be._

Tears are blurring her vision. How long has she somehow known? The clues have been there all along, the occupied mother, the absent father, the tangled mess of emotions, the outbursts, the talent, the _darkness,_ but she’s just ignored them, in favor of everything else he wrote. 

_I’ll turn 18 in a couple of months. I should just leave, leave the academy, leave master, leave all of it._

It’s the last note. Rey stares at the page for the longest time, until her tears dry up, and rage starts to bubble in her chest. 

“Fucking nerfherder,” she grits out, and rips the last page from the book. 

She proceeds to tear the page into pieces, while wheezing every curse she knows, in every language she speaks. Her hand fills with a pile of torn up words, and she stands up, in order to fling the pieces out over the pond. The wind catches them, and the pieces scatter like snow across the water. Rey bites her jaws tightly together, sinks back to the ground, and buries her face in her hands. Out of all of the people, in the entire galaxy, she had to find _his_ notebooks, and here she sits, bawling, like an _idiot_. 

“Why are you crying?” it’s the first thing he’s said to her in over a week.

She doesn’t answer, and she doesn’t look up, but she can tell, by his sharp intake of breath, when he spots the worn book in her lap. 

“Where did you get that?” he growls, with any trace of sympathy in his voice swiftly wiped away.

Their height difference is magnified, with her sitting on the ground and him standing up, so she scrambles to her feet, desperate to save whatever there’s left of her dignity. She squares her shoulders, and pins him down with her gaze.

“You used to dream of me,” it’s not a question, it’s an accusation. 

Kylo frowns, and seems to lose a bit of his metaphorical footing. He runs his hand through his hair in a familiar gesture, and Rey hates herself for knowing him well enough to recognize his mannerisms. He clears his throat.

“I still do, sometimes.”

”When did you realize it was me?” it’s not what she’d planned to say, but it’s too late to take it back.

“I wasn’t sure until Starkiller.”

A forgotten memory flashes through Rey’s mind. The fear, the snow, Finn, a blue saber, a red saber, a voice murmuring _‘it_ ** _is_** _you’,_ the woods… Rey swallows, suddenly lost for words. Kylo steps closer, and searches her face.

“Rey…” 

“No!” Rey snaps, “You’ve no right to my name.”

His frown turns into a scowl, and he steps even closer. 

“Listen,” he snarls, “don’t you see that all of this _means_ something? We’ve always been connected! Haven’t you dreamt something..? Of me?”

His voice strains a little at the end, and a flicker of the boy she knows everything about shines through, for a second.

“ _No_ ,” she lies, without breaking eye contact, “I’ve never dreamt a thing about _you_.” 

He flinches, and Rey can’t take it, she can’t face the boy within this monster of a man.

“I thought you had killed him, but this is so much worse,” she hisses, and steps close enough to feel his body heat, “it’s so much worse,” her voice breaks, and she makes a halfhearted attempt to shove him out of her way.

He doesn’t budge. Her hands stay curled up into fists against him, without her noticing it.

“I can’t believe you chose to become _this_ ,” she pounds her right hand against his chest, “and left Ben Solo behind.”

“I didn’t choose,” his hands rise from his sides, almost like he’s about to grab her, before they fall back down, “others chose for me.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“Ask my saintly uncle.”

”I’m asking you.”

“Luke Skywalker couldn’t live with the shame of failing making me a copy of himself,” Kylo grunts, with eyes so intense they hurt to meet, “He tried to kill me off.”

“Liar!” Rey shoves him again, this time with the Force behind it, and he stumbles backwards a couple of steps.

“Search your feelings,” he smirks, “you know it’s true.”

  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, do I have to make them kiss and make up now? 
> 
> Also! I geeked out and created my very first [mood board.](https://youmakemefeellike.tumblr.com/post/645368788942012416/me-yesterday-so-this-is-as-far-as-ill-go-i-can) I feel like a five year old, showing off to mom 😂


End file.
